2082 13 5
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I'm somewhere on I-10 in Mississippi, barreling westbound at 80 miles an hour through a rainstorm on a late Wednesday afternoon. The last road sign I remember was for Beauvoir, some Confederate general's…
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208241
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I was about to answer when that something emerged from the woods. It was not an animal, after all, but a woman dressed all in brown. She approached our porch windows. I shuddered and turned away. But her coming was inevitable. When I turned back, she
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208197
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This little town lost its mill...
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20803624
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Dexter is a demon. He called me an over-accessorized hot spot yesterday evening and FYI: he didn’t even kiss me. I slammed the door and left my own apartment. I slept in my car.
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207962
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Lady Macbeth goes around moaning “out, out damned spot,” when a well-placed lick would have solved the problem immediately, with no unnecessary and heavy-handed dialogue. Once again, clumsy work.
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207921
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Chusma de la Calle had the most beautiful scarves. Gentle, warm sheaths of silk she kept in a special drawer lined with tissue and rosehip sachets tucked in the corners. She had scarves of every color, but most were shades of her favorite, blue. …
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207530
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Imagine, if you will, the heartland of America–the Mississippi River Valley–as a woman sprawled out on a bed.
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207521
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It was twilight, and the sky was getting darker even as the lights of civilization were becoming more noticeable in the gloom. The daytime city, with its grit and dust and texture, was disappearing. Soon there would only be electric light and neon and the
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20752916
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Moving is like moving upstream, like swimming underwater against a mighty current. You are salmon people: pink, vulnerable.
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20743021
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"My mother loses patience when I get sad," I said. "She tells me about the dog."
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20733314
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"My, aren't you queery looking? She says.
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20723929
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He looks in silence and he looks with longing.
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207275
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Voltaire drinks his coffee standing up in front of the microwave and he likes to hold one hand on his chest where his heart is while he drinks. He likes to feel his heartbeat quicken and then he imagines that he is a machine or something mechanical.
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20723214
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I knew I was on the wrong bus, but jumping off was a death sentence. I was afraid, but by then I was used to that.
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207284
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At least, I think it was him. It sure looked like him.
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207222
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These things were indeed the wealth of our respective nations.
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20712114
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The last time she wore fur-lined gloves...
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2071119
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Garage-sale variety olive-green corduroy, elbow patches, hems too short. His jacket pocket produced answers one afternoon like strips of paper from cracked fortune cookies.
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207055
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I made this robot. Everyone was making them. Mine was a vacuum cleaner with a rubber jack-o-lantern mask taped to the handle. His name was Z-Bot2131F, but I just called him Brady, after my dead brother. Brady, my brother, had come out cold, and…
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206996
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This is a fairy tale. There is a princess who is not a princess but we will call her a princess because every fairy tale has a princess. Her name is Tanya. She's the daughter of a mechanic and a housewife. She has two brothers and two sisters. She is the middle…
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20682521
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i could make swamp boys believe / under dust-sheets stiffened by ice
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20671511
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Library life is full of surprises.
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2067197
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"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.'--Nadine Gordimer Other things do matter just as much of course. Of course they do. Hey I'm still kind of alive inside this poem here. At least I'd like to think so, so yes another…
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206552
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If I was going to liberate myself from my marriage to Rosie, the first step ought to be to liberate myself from my wedding band. That wasn't going to be easy. Along with the more prominent rolls of fat I'd been accumulating, my ring finger now bulged over the upper…
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20631410
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...what will happen to me buying drugs on the street, at night...?
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206211
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The neatly-gentrified Mtsensk District plaster buckled in all the right grey-painted places. The aged, yellowing windows rose and fell in fashionable decay. It was a well-upholstered citizen's slum, drawn to exacting state specifications. Local housing authorities…
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2061113
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Can I really be blamed? Look at the circumstantial evidence: you wore that skirt, which can hardly be called a skirt. More like a very wide plaid belt.
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2061237
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I made him stop at an AM-PM. We bought a bag of barbecue chips and a yellow rose. Those days, we were testing our keels, sloshing against whatever rose most wicked. On the way to Beth Anne's apartment, we passed a man on the shoulder heaving a couch back
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20602121
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"... you shake your head and look down as if I am a mongrel dog who has pissed the Tabriz..."
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2059119
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So, as the lines on my face grow more pronounced, the lines on my finger prints are fading away?
All I can say is that it's a damn shame it's not the other way around.
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